Born in Athens and now based in Berlin, musician & composer Hior Chronik began in music as a radio producer for jazz radio in the early 90s as well as writing for various magazines. The first milestone of his career as a solo artist arrived in 2010 with a debut album entitled I’m a Tree. Since then, he has gone on to garner millions of streams for a growing catalog of expressive solo and collaborative works ranging from the melancholic introspection to experimental and cinematic soundscapes.
Chronik’s latest project is described as “an instrumental ambient record of enormous scope”. Three years in the making, Apofanie finds him collaborating with thirteen stellar artists from around the globe whose work also traverses the world of electronic, ambient and neoclassical music. Each track was written with its own method of collaborative composition, with Hior exchanging ideas and layers online with each artist – Andy Aquarius (Germany), Yara Asmar (Lebanon), Asia Dojnikowska (Poland), Matt Emery (UK), Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres (UK), Hanakiv (Estonia), Hannes Kretzer (Germany), Kin Leonn (Singapore), Moshimoss (Japan), Tomasz Mrenca (Poland), Shuzhen (Malaysia), Natalia Tsupryk (Ukraine), Olga Wojciechowska (Poland).
The title is a happy accident that ended up as deliberate word play which conveys the album’s motif. It is a misspelling of apophenia which refers to the perception of meaningful patterns in random or meaningless data. It is a word which can have negative connotations in the realm of human behavior, but Hior turns it into a romanticized lens through which to see the discovery and inspiration at the heart of his creative process.
I was experiencing this as I was writing – finding meaning in seemingly random configurations – but I couldn’t quite remember the right word and somehow it became Apofanie to me. I kept using the ‘wrong’ word and it started to feel romantic to me – similar to the definition of Apophenia, I liked that I was assigning meaning to something that didn’t exist.
Hior Chronik
The end result is a beautiful and multi-faceted musical tapestry with each artist weaving in their own unique voices and colors around Chronik’s cohesive vision. Ahead of its release by Moderna Records on June 10, you can listen here to Apofanie in full. Enjoy.
Bandcamp (CD/digital) | Moderna Records
